ULTRA FRUSTRATING: Volume Scatter/Apsorption Stopped Working!!!!!!!!!!

I on the other hand would suggest not spreading yourself too thin. Blender is a mega huge beast, there's just too much stuff to learn. So maybe forget about volume and scatter and all that stuff for now, it usually depends on so many other things and sliders that it can get frustrating when it's not working, because you need to have so much previous knowledge to troubleshoot each time it goes wrong, and it will go wrong a lot even if you fix it one time. So I'd say just step back or continue and come back to troubling things later. Modeling alone is a vast topic, even before the even grater topic of shaders.